


Sail Us to the Moon

by juggyjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Fluff, M/M, Soulmate AU, ace jughead, colorblind au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 07:04:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10485132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juggyjones/pseuds/juggyjones
Summary: Veronica Lodge comes to town introducing Jughead to the meaning of words 'colour' and 'soulmate', and he begins to question his feelings towards Archie.





	1. Binary World

Human mind is a complex thing. Fragile and cautious, yet capable of deceiving itself into oblivion; once drowned in lies, beautiful memories not many could vouch for, there is little that can be done.

Humans are said to be the most intelligent creatures on the planet—or in the universe, if you believe in aliens—yet they destroy themselves all on their own, more than any other species can. They’re so self-aware it exceeds limits of rationality, turning into a beautifully thread web of sweet nothing and faux memories they’ve built for themselves. They have the ability to forget the bad and only remember the good even from the situations that had no good inception – evidently, permanently and consequently, building them more on imagination than reality.

Try this – believe in lies. Believe that the good always comes after the bad, even though the entirety of human history and the entire theory of human nature and evolution speaks against. Good coming after the bad implies there is a cycle of only two fixed and interchangeable variables, when reality is much more morally challenged. Unfortunately for most people, the world isn’t binary – it isn’t black and white.

Well, at least for  _him_  it isn’t.

Until he turned seventeen, those were the things Jughead Jones worried his poor little head with. For someone who hasn’t been through not even one quarter of his life, he’d thought an awful lot about things that should’ve been beyond his age and maturity range. Yet, truth be told, he was everything but the typical teenager.

So, Jughead thought for the most of his seventeen years, the world was a little bit bitchy. It seemed it was easier for people just to believe something good will happen as they deserved it for suffering through any bad it had previously given them. Quite the opposite of karma, he’d say.

He doesn’t fit in. He doesn’t see the world as binary, with two interchangeable variables that cause one another and happen in an infinite, regular cycle. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t raised to be religious, so he never found god or solution in something as complex and was left with his own complex thoughts.

Except, that all changed when Veronica Lodge rolled into town and fell in love with Betty Cooper.

“How do you know you love her?” Jughead remembers asking her, once.

Veronica doesn’t hesitate. “Because I see colours.”

“Colours?”

Jughead, in all his seventeen years of life, has never heard of the word prior to that very moment. It takes Veronica quite a long time to explain it, telling him how she’s learned about the word and its meaning through thorough education by one of her father’s mythology lecturers.

To a boy who has spent his entire life marvelling at the thought of the impossible, it is fascinating. He watches her with wide eyes sparkling with interest, archiving all the newfound data into an extremely profoundly-designed mental palace, brick by brick.

By the time she’s finished telling and he’s all out of questions, the palace has been completed and darkness has fallen upon the small town. Yet the wonder hasn’t died out and his eyes still sparkle with thirst and desire for knowing more about the so-called ‘colours’ – he knows he is going to scour the library for any literature on it as soon as there’s nothing left for her to tell him.

Jughead takes a sip of his milkshake – the fourth one.

“So, let me get this straight.” He waits until Veronica nods, then proceeds with a heavy sigh and closed eyes. “Colours are what we see every day, but we’re not aware of it because until we’ve met out soulmate, they all seem grey.”

“Black and white.”

“Okay, black and white. But, when we meet our soulmate—which is, like, someone meant for us?”

Veronica nods again, lips forming a thin smile. “There’s only one for each person in the world.”

“Okay. I got that.” Jughead takes another sip, thinking. “So when we meet them, we begin to see colours.”

“Exactly.”

“And the reason why people don’t know about these things is because although everyone has their soulmate, not many people actually meet them.”

“ _See_  them,” Veronica corrects. “You don’t actually have to meet them. When I first saw Betty, I knew immediately because everything changed.” There’s a short pause, followed by a sigh. “Have you ever been in love?”

Jughead thinks about it. He thinks about kissing Ethel in third grade—or did she kiss him?—and kissing Betty once, when they were fifteen, and thinks about how it made him feel. He tries to recall the way their lips tasted but it seems so meaningless he doesn’t bother with it for longer than two seconds.

“No.”

“Hm.” Veronica leans forward, head resting atop her hands and her gaze is intense. Her dark eyebrows furrow just a little bit and to Jughead, it seems as if she can feel her contemplating. “It feels very similar, just stronger.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s like a wave washing over you, seeing your soulmate for the first time,” Veronica admits; her voice becomes dreamy and there’s a smile dancing at the very corners of her lips. “It feels like the ocean in your chest and electricity buzzing in your fingers, and you have so much air in your lungs you feel like you’re about to burst.”

Jughead wrinkles his nose. “Sounds painful.”

“Oh, god, no,” Veronica laughs. “It’s amazing. You feel  _alive_ for the first time, like before you couldn’t breathe at all.”

“Really?” He cocks his brow. “Still doesn’t sound quite painless.”

“There’s always a little pain in a lot of love.”

To that, he only rolls his eyes.

Almost involuntarily, he thinks if he’s ever felt like that. A part of him is desperate for him to be able to say he has, but he knows he would’ve noticed feeling as if he can breathe for the first time. All he can think of is when he was little and a ball flew right into his stomach, knocking all air out of his lungs – only to see Archie’s tear-stained face filled with guilt.

“What do colours feel like?”

The question, to him, seems perfectly rational; everyone in his place would wonder that. His fingers nib at the collar of his jacket.

Jughead tries to think of the colour she called blue, tries to imagine it feeling like the ocean. But she also said it feels like the sky, and he associates blue with open space waiting to be filled – and feels lonely in an instant.

Then red – roses. Roses and blood, prickly little thorns protecting him, guarding him and hurting him and he doesn’t think he likes red. It feels too invasive, too cold and too exhausting – much like the blue’s opposite.

And green, green’s new and fresh; it’s like stepping out on a warm spring morning and wiggling your toes into the grass. It feels slow and quiet on the inside, but so much life and joy surrounding you; it feels like a breath of fresh air that feels your lungs and you could breathe and breathe and  _breathe_ —

“I can see them.”

It’s Veronica’s turn to cock a brow.

Jughead feels it; it’s not relief, it’s something entirely else. But there’s fresh air and there’s thorns in his lungs and there’s the vast emptiness he’s yet to explore—it’s all been there for a very long time.

Now that he knows it, it’s simple. “It’s Archie.”


	2. Chapter 2

He told himself that night,  _wait a month. See how things are. Observe yourself the way you do with everyone else_.

It’s not exactly that asking Archie about this frightens him, now or at any point since he’d come to the realization – he didn’t know if it was true. Instead of telling him immediately, like Veronica did with Betty—because they were quite a different case—he used the time to do as much research on the subject as possible.

Sadly, he came to find out, there wasn’t much left to be uncovered by the journalist. Less than two percent of the population even gets into contact with their soulmate and, most of the time, they’re not even aware of what’s going on. Some of them are even placed into mental health institutions.

His case was an extreme rarity. Finding your soulmate alone was a very weak possibility and people generally—even the ones who have—spent their lives with a wrong person. Growing up with your soulmate has, in fact, not yet been documented.

“Archie,” he asks him, once, “do you believe that some people are destined to be together?”

The redheaded boy looks up from his music sheet and frowns; the scar between his eyebrows crinkles and it looks like a really big wrinkle, brining a tired smile to Jughead’s face.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe. Why?”

Jughead shrugs, that time. “Just thinking.”

Archie goes back to his music and Jughead goes back to his book, though his eyes remain on the other boy.

Now, that he thinks of it, the feeling in his chest wasn’t one that people feel for everybody. For example, when he looked at Betty that very same day, it was different – she didn’t feel like tired smiles and wrinkled scars, or smell like too worn varsity jacket combined with sweat, and something so _Archie_ he couldn’t put it in words.

Spending time with Betty has a limit. He knows when it begins and when it should end. With Archie, it’s always and never at the same time. He’s sure, the Andrews boy could call him up and four in the morning and he wouldn’t be the least surprised or not inclined to do whatever he wants him to.

He asked Veronica about it, once.

“It feels like home,” she told him. “There’s really no better way to put it.”

Jughead figured she knows, because her and Betty had that _something_ he couldn’t put in words. It’s like they’ve known each other not since they were little, but from the beginning of time – the way it feels when he’s with Archie.

After a month of very carefully planned and executed introspection and observation of everyone around him, he comes to the conclusion that there’s no way his soulmate could be anyone else. It’s fairly simple and obvious, now that he thinks of it.

“Shouldn’t soulmate feel like love?” he asks Betty once day when they’re walking from the Blue and Gold office.

The blonde’s ponytail swings as she takes a long look at him.

“I don’t know.” She’s quiet. “It just feels right.”

It doesn’t help him, not even when he tries to ask Kevin about it and realizes the boy’s as clueless as he was upon Veronica’s arrival. His only and most reliable source is himself, so he takes it to a test and talks to Archie about it.

They’re sitting each on their own bed, doing their own things. Again, Archie is practicing music—it’s been a long time since he couldn’t do it in front of Jughead—and he is working on his book, time and again.

He doesn’t prepare himself. He just blurts it out.

“Roses.”

There’s quiet when Archie stops pulling the strings and looks at him, the wrinkle between his eyebrows—the one Jughead loves so much—settling there. His gaze is long and quiet, as his face, and Jughead takes a deep breath.

“Do roses and blood have anything in common?”

Archie tilts his head to the side, ever so slightly; a small breath escapes his lips. “I don’t know.”

“What about the ocean and the sky?”

“I guess?”

“Archie, what about the grass and the trees?”

His face darkens as they stare at each other, Jughead in pure passion and desire to know, and Archie in innocent confusion. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”

Jughead takes a deep breath.

“Doesn’t the sky feel empty and vast and big and you feel a little lonely? And the ocean looks the same, it’s so big and you feel insignificant and so _small_ , but it’s good,” Jughead says. His voice is quiet and he feels a little dizzy, but keeps talking. “And roses and blood are both red, that’s what it’s called. The sky and the ocean are blue. And the grass – god, Archie, don’t you ever look at the grass and feel like the world is yours?”

They stare at each other for a very long time. Jughead doesn’t know if it’s a bad sign or a good sign, because Archie looks like he’s going to faint. He’s a little pale and his lips are red and for the first time, Jughead feels something pulling him towards the boy – not desire or lust, not exactly.

Perhaps, dare he say, it’d be the sense of home only Archie can offer.

Archie’s gaze softens just a little, and his face falters. “I don’t know. Maybe I do, but I’ve never felt any other way.”

“Remember when we were five, or six, and you kicked a ball at me?”

“Yeah.”

“You were crying when you came to me,” Jughead reminds him. “Your abdomen hurt, right?”

“I don’t—“ begins Archie, but his eyes widen before he gets to say anything else. “How do you know?”

“Because,” is all Jughead says. Then comes a heavy sigh and he spills it all out.

He tells Archie everything Veronica told him that night exactly thirty days ago, filling in the holes with the knowledge he’s gained from scouring the library. Archie listens carefully and there are few times when Jughead thinks something significant happened in Archie’s brain, but doesn’t comment on it.

After all, he doesn’t end up being overly emotional. He delivers the lesson in a confident yet quiet voice, as if what he is saying is a secret—it _is_ a secret, now he thinks of it—and at one point even sits on the floor opposite of Archie because he needs to do _something_. Dusk comes and goes, settling behind Betty’s window and Archie is still paying all his attention to the boy in a grey crown beanie.

Throughout the lecture, he doesn’t get to think of a way to break it for Archie – to make it _real._ As much as he told Veronica and Betty about his connection to the redhead, it isn’t going to be real until he lets him know, without coming back.

So, much like the beginning of this revelation, he blurts it out.

“For me, it’s you. Just you.”

It sounds much cheesier than he wants it to, but he doesn’t let his eyes wander away from Archie’s even though his entire face is at least ten degrees hotter than it should be.

“Is there any way we can test it?”

Jughead nods and takes out a copy of a page he’d taken from a book about colours, containing two sets – one that the people without soulmates can see, and one they can’t. The difference, to him, is marvellous – blue is so much different than red it was like saying the ocean and blood look and feel the same. Veronica and Betty both agreed but, upon showing it to Kevin, there was no result. They looked the same to him.

His fingers tremble when he stretches his hand to give it to Archie. The boy doesn’t end up taking it, instead comes to sit right next to Jughead; the entire left side of his body can certainly measure with his face in heat.

Archie frowns at the paper and doesn’t say anything for a while. Jughead watches him, his every move, analysing them even though they surely don’t mean something important. The scar between his brows, the one Jughead loves so much, feels like something he couldn’t picture Archie without.

It’s not the first time he realizes that, but it’s when it hits him the hardest: life without Archie in it would be a very, very different one and Jughead doubts he’d like living in it.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Archie says.

There’s so much one can hear about someone’s heart breaking – experiencing it is earth-shattering.

Except Archie doesn’t notice Jughead’s broken sigh, and points to the red. “I only see four different boxes, but they’ve always looked like this so I don’t know—“

He doesn’t get to finish because Jughead kisses him on the lips. There’s so much gratitude in the way he holds onto Archie as if he were holding for dear life, they’re both taken aback. Without a fear of being rejected, things feel far different for Jughead, now that he knows that it’s absolute.

That he and Archie are, as cheesy as it is, _meant to be_.

“Shut up.” He kisses him again; briefly, at the corner of his mouth. “It’s four colours and a white paper. Blue, red and two shades of gray. If you were colorblind, you would’ve seen only two different shades of gray.”

There’s silence after that and when Archie’s eyes fall to the window, Jughead wonders if he overdid it. It slipped his mind Archie has _never_ showed any interest in boys and although he himself only ever kissed two girls and it left a bad impression, he never showed any interest in boys, either.

Shame’s an awful emotion. It washes over you like acid rain, chocking you yet leaving just enough air to get through to not kill you.

Jughead’s hands fall to his lap. He looks away, wondering how the hell he’s going to fix this – and mend his heart, broken two times in two minutes. Not even Betty felt this bad when Archie rejected her.

“Juggie,” a soft voice calls for him. “Let’s take this slow.”

When he turns around, Archie places a kiss on his lips – gentle and cautious, but his hands rest on Jughead’s warm cheeks and it feels good.

“Yeah,” Jughead says. “One day at a time.”

Archie nods, and Jughead knows that the sky and ocean are vast and blue, the rose and blood are red and painful and the grass and trees are green.

He feels green, in that moment. Invincible; like he’s breathing for the very first time.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading this! i hope you enjoyed this, leave a comment below if you did. it means a lot to me. and, as per usual, you can also find me on tumblr at riverdalefiction.


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